OK, maybe not their employees or others that find themselves in the path of said villainy, but for investors, sometimes it’s the despised companies that make the better return, writes Mark Hulbert.

Among the examples on offer, the five companies that topped 24/7 Wall Street’s listof most-hated companies in January 2013 have subsequently returned 55%, double that of the most-admired companies — something Hulbert finds to be the rule more often than the exception. Read the column here.

Shares rebounded strongly on Wednesday, jumping more than 4% after reporting fourth-quarter results and saying it had incurred $61 million worth of total expenses in the fourth quarter. That as offset by a $44 million insurance payment, reducing the company’s net expense to $17 million.

Home builders are having a field day on the back of strong home sales data. Buyers of brand new homes came out in droves in January despite the cold weather and rising mortgage rates. You can read our take on the report here.

Stocks got a boost from an upbeat home sales report, but not everyone thinks the picture is that positive. Yet.

Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics thinks monthly data are unreliable and don’t fit with most other evidence.

January new home sales jumped to a five-year high, well above the consensus forecast.

So, not all the data have been hit by the severe weather. Except that they might have been; the margin of error in the headline new home sales number is plus or minus 84K.

If we take it at face value, though, the message from this report is that the underlying trend in sales is now rising strongly again. The problem with this idea is that it is impossible to square with both the continued decline in existing home sales and the extreme weakness of mortgage applications, even after allowing for the usual seasonally-afflicted Feb drop in the latter.

Homebuilders could be gaining market share from private sellers, but we need more than one strong month to confirm that.

The new deal will essentially mean the bank can reduce the amount of new preferred stock it has to issue to reach the capital ratio required by regulators, according to MarketWatch’s banking reporter Sital Patel.

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